SPRING CLEANING: A ROUNDUP OF CHICAGO THEATER AMID THE LAST TWO MONTHS OF WINTER

T.S. Eliot is known for his reservations about spring. Yet the author of the line "April is the cruelest month" wrote a friend in April 1911 to tell her about how beautiful the season was. "Paris has burst out, during my absence," Eliot wrote, "and it is such a revelation that I feel I ought to make it known. At London, one pretended that it was spring, and tried to coax the spring, and talk of the beautiful weather; but one continued to hibernate amongst the bricks ... But here!" Chicago has been more like Eliot's London than his Paris recently, but spring is almost here, so it’s time to clean out my notebook of winter stage observations from the last seven weeks of Chicago theater. After a somewhat sparse fall season for Chicago theater, with few productions that I personally found exciting, the winter has been productive. These nine shows, ranging from opera to musical theater to straight plays to one Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, show a little of the breadth and depth of the Chicago arts scene. They are organized in reverse chronological order, with the one I saw most recently first.

Dance of Death by August Strindberg, in a new version by Conor McPherson, Steppenwolf Theatre.
March 12.
Twenty years before August Strindberg’s 1900 play Dance of Death debuted, a Parisian neurologist named Dr. Jules Cotard first described a neuropsychiatric disorder in which sufferers believe themselves to be dead. Dubbed “Cotard’s syndrome,” and sometimes called by the wonderfully evocative names “walking corpse syndrome” or nihilistic delusion, the disorder saturates the sensibility of Strindberg’s play. Its lead, Edgar, whose toxic marriage is the subject of the play, even expresses directly the sentiment that he might have died. It’s conceivable this was an intentional inclusion: the playwright was widely read, had lived in Paris, and was fascinated with psychology. (His rival Ibsen is credited as an inspiration for Freud.) It’s more likely, though, that Strindberg picked up the notion of walking death from the romantic and gothic literature he knew well, rather than specialist psychiatric journals. In any case, nihilistic delusion is right on brand for Strindberg. His plays are often bitingly baleful and seethingly angry. Dance of Death is as good an example of both qualities as exists in his oeuvre. But in what Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre bills as “a new version” by Conor McPherson (The Weir) this month, it’s also uproariously funny. McPherson’s version is not really new: his script debuted 14 years ago in a production in London, then ran at Classic Stage Company in New York City in 2019 and even in the Chicago market at Writer’s Theatre in Glencoe in 2021. But the new version does bring a contemporary feel that serves the play well. I remember that when I first saw Dance, in a recording of its last Broadway revival (starring Sir Ian McKellen and Dame Helen Mirren from 2002) I was immediately gob-smacked by the obvious similarities to Edward Albee’s similarly bitter depiction of a bickering married couple, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Albee’s biographer Mel Gussow asserts that the similarity is not accidental, and the play’s vast influence on American theater is thrilling to trace while watching. The McKellen-Mirren production happens to have inspired the one running this month at Steppenwolf, according to an interview on the theater’s web site with company co-founder Jeff Perry, who stars in this production. But then how many productions of Dance have there been to inspire a new one? The only two other productions of the play on Broadway were both in the early 1970s. As that somewhat slim performance history implies, opportunities to see this play remain rare even in a city like Chicago or New York. However, Chicagoans got a nice double dose of the Swedish master this year, as Miss Julie (the one Strindberg that gets done much) at the Court Theatre was running concurrently with this Dance of Death.  It was difficult at first not to compare Steppenwolf ensemble members Perry, Kathryn Erbe and Cliff Chamberlain to the Sir and Dame. By the end, I’d mostly forgotten McKellen but still longed for Mirren. Perry found a stylized groove not far from the one he brought to Harold Pinter’s absurdist No Man’s Land. He seems to be following McKellen’s career closely: that Pinter deep cut was also performed in by Sir Ian, in a production I saw in Berkeley in its pre-Broadway run. (Perry played the Patrick Stewart part in that show, however, not the McKellan role.) Perry brought out the hilarious but existential depths of Edgar with his Pinteresque performance. Erbe, as his wife Alice, was often very funny but she lacked the conceptual eccentricity that made Perry pop, and the life-wearied facial lines that make Mirren’s visage so rich. Chamberlain has been turning in great performances in Chicago since he helped launch the recently defunct House Theatre 25 years ago, but here his comic contributions didn’t always land, as he sometimes was inclined to substitute shouting for comic timing. The set, a toweringly tall jail converted into a residence, is just the setting for these dark ruminations on matrimony. But McPherson’s adaptation stays uproarious enough that the biting blackness of the humor does not sting much. It could even have stung a little more.

The Gondoliers by Gilbert and Sullivan Opera Company at Mandel Hall at the University of Chicago.
March 6
With its satire of the objections to democracy and republicanism, The Gondoliers is very Great Britain 1889. The Third Reform Act had just passed in 1884 under William Gladstone when it was first performed, expanding the electorate to most men, particularly in the country. The word “democracy” was only just coming out of its long-held place as a dirty word in English politics, and for many of the British political elite it still held that position. That atmosphere was the context for the comic world of the operetta, in which two republican Gondoliers discover that one of them (they don’t know which) is the king, and promote everyone to the nobility. The Grand Inquisitor, played here with crackling wit by Gabe Levi, thus delivers William S. Gilbert’s sparkling line, “When everyone is somebodee then no-one’s anybody.” (Sic.) I’ve been attending this company, Chicago’s most consistent source of G&S operettas, for decades. Every March they turn out another G&S show, usually from the canon. I’m sorry to have missed the few times they’ve stepped outside the most popular shows, such as Utopia Limited in 1993 and The Grand Duke in 1996. The Gondoliers I’ve seen them do three times, but as those shows were 14 and 23 years ago, respectively, it was time for a refresher. A university-based community company (with which my father performed in their earliest days in the early 1960s) the troupe has gobs of comedic energy and more spirit than you can find in many more professional productions, including from what I’ve seen Broadway’s somewhat odd revival of Pirates of Penzance last year with David Hyde Pierce. G&SOC can also be rough around the edges, but who cares? The Gondoliers is bright in multiple senses and full of bangers. It is true that in the long first half less happens than in other G&S operettas, as the four lovers are identified early, and united at the end after several somewhat protracted ensemble numbers. But the second half, which plunges the characters into the sharp satire of republican politics, shines. Levi as the Grand Inquisitor was the highlight; I saw the show on its second night, but already the crowd was primed to buzz and cheer just before Levi marched on stage. He takes the place another great singer named Dorian McCall occupied in the last two years, as the pirate king in Pirates and Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd in Ruddigore. The other highlight was Anna Caldwell’s vibrato-wielding Gianetta.

Die Silbersee. Composer: Kurt Weill. Librettist: George Kaiser. Chicago Opera Theatre. Studebaker Theatre.
March 4
When Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht in 1930 produced their last full-length opera collaboration, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, the Great Depression had just started, replacing a chaotic economic time in which “capitalism had reached comfortable maturity, when greed was enjoying its ripe old age and hope was on its deathbed,” as The New York Times put it when the Metropolitan Opera produced that opera in 1995. Just three years later, Brecht had fled the country, and Weill had replaced him with a new librettist named George Kaiser. Together they wrote a new opera (or is it a musical? An operetta? Weill called it a “play with music.”). Die Silbersee was just given an exceedingly rare and exciting production by the Chicago Opera Theatre early this month. Weill and Kaiser now faced a different, even more difficult environment: Hitler had taken power 18 days before the show opened, capitalism had been in a state of collapse after American loans were pulled from the German economy, and economic inequality was rampant. The change from the former environment to the latter gives Die Silbersee, or The Silverlake, a spooky resonance in the present day. The show in 1930 ran for only 16 performances before the show was shut down. The Nazis were not fans of its peculiar Brechtian fairy tale vision of a poor man (Severin, played by Chaz’men Williams-Ali) shot by a policeman (Olim, played by Justin Hopkins) for stealing a pineapple. Severin and Olim then encounter a sort of Fascist villain (Leah Dexter as an aristocrat turned servant turned evil overlord). Many publications say the Nazis banned the show; the program says it was never formally banned but collapsed due to intense pressures that included the Nazi reaction. The Nazis labeled the show, and all of the Jewish Weill’s work, “Entartete Kunst,” or degenerate art. Just weeks later Weill followed Brecht out of the country. The Chicago Opera Theatre production is one of few in American history, and one of the more faithful. Harold Prince made a musical of it in a 1980 production by the New York City Opera, starring non-opera singer Joel Grey. But productions of it as an opera are infrequent. COT General Director Lawrence Edelson cut the show down from its original four and a half hours to three but added back characters who had been trimmed from prior versions. Weill’s music is a lost gem—Edelson says he left the score behind when he fled Germany, and it wasn’t rediscovered for decades. The arias lack the melodic pizzazz of Weill’s “Mack the Knife,” but they are full of gorgeous melody appropriately complicated by Weill’s trademark sixths, as well as ninths and elevenths. The production is very well designed, with fanciful costumes designed by Erik Teague, and a set that manages to be both exterior and interior at once, as the haunting specter of the Silverlake never quite leaves the set. Subtitled A Winter’s Fairytale, Die Silbersee was a perfectly haunting late winter spectacle. With themes of police brutality, the specter of fascism overtaking a community, and brooding depression of a sort reminiscent of our age of doomscrolling, the opera is as well-timed as it is well-constructed. Perhaps its lessons can help move us out of the Mahagonny City without landing in the Silverlake.

Holiday by Richard Greenberg, based on the play by Philip Barry
February 22
The late Philip Barry (The Philadelphia Story) and the recently deceased Richard Greenberg (Three Days of Rain) are both sharp, witty playwrights who share a fascination with the culture of the wealthy elites of their day. Either one of them individually can knock your Bombas off with articulate comic dialogue. But fused together, as their jibes and jokes are in the Goodman Theatre’s new modern-day adaptation of Barry’s 1928 Holiday, the two playwrights pack twice the punch. Moving the action from the eve of the 1929 Wall Street crash to the eve of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, Greenberg shows how little—and how much—has changed in the realm of the rich. The update of Barry’s witticisms is seamless and effective despite its topicality. (One character, trying to ascertain whether another character is wealthy, asks by way of deduction, “Have you ever said the words ‘All Lives Matter?’” The audience loved it.) If the play were only half an hour shorter, cutting down a long, undisciplined scene in the penultimate act, it would be one of the better creations of Greenberg’s distinguished career. In fact, though it is being staged just seven months after Greenberg’s death last year, Holiday is as alive as his writing has been for years. From 2016 to 2021 Greenberg had written a string of off-Broadway shows that failed to make much of a dent in the theater world. Before that he had a trio of New York productions in 2013, all of which I saw: his critically derided Breakfast at Tiffany’s adaptation on Broadway and Far From Heaven musical both struggled to make clear why they existed. His last (justifiably) successful play, The Assembled Parties, was another witty display of its characters’ wealth that landed several Tony nominations. The 2026 Holiday also marks the return of its Tony-winning director, Robert Falls, to his longtime home at the Goodman Theatre, from which he retired as artistic director after the pandemic. Falls has assembled an amazing ensemble of mostly Chicago-based actors, led by Bryce Gangel as Linda Seton, the character played by Katharine Hepburn in the 1938 film version of Barry’s play. I know Linda is the character Hepburn plays, though I haven’t seen the movie yet, not only because I looked it up but because Gangel does such a phenomenal job of capturing Hepburn’s physicality and timing while making it entirely her own. Hepburn was so distinctive that when her movies are remade the actors who play her roles must find some way to mimic her style, as did Grace Kelly in the musical adaptation of Barry’s Philadelphia Story, High Society. The challenge of Greenberg’s dialogue is that all of the characters have a similarly crackling wit, thus each player must find his or her own way into the material. Falls’ cast does so excellently. Jordan Lage brings a stuffiness to Linda’s rich father without getting in the way of the jokes, a feat. Molly Griggs finds an entirely different energy from Linda’s as her sister while being almost equally witty. The entire cast, particularly Gangel, deserves a shot at Broadway, and there are rumblings this production is headed there. Falls will simply have to take a scalpel to the next-to-last act, and this double wit-fest should be ready to stand as an elegiac monument to these two lost talents.

Eureka Day by Jonathan Spector at Broadway Playhouse, by Timeline Theatre Company and Broadway in Chicago.
February 21
In the Chicago debut of the Tony winning Best Revival of a Play for 2025, Eureka Day shows that it only gets timelier. When I first encountered this comic treatise on the anti-vaxxer movement, it seemed like a brilliant local play for Berkeley, California, a rare example of community journalism taking a theatrical form. (I already wrote a paragraph or two on Eureka Day in a story on the subject of theater by, for, and about a particular community, so I won’t add much here.) But after COVID-19 happened, it got more topical, and now that the top health official in the country is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., it is even more so. The audience was bursting with reactions the night I saw it, not only in what I imagine are the usual waves of rolling laughter at the key Zoom meeting scene in act one, but at all the references to anti-vax sentiment. People groaned, jeered, guffawed as Kennedy’s point of view was articulated. PJ Powers, who is the artistic director of Timeline as well as one of the stars of this show, anchors the cast with punctilious nerdiness. But the whole cast deserves plaudits for executing this well-oiled laughter machine. Modeled perhaps on Bruce Norris’ well-made plays that expose the darker undersides of liberalism while collecting laughs from audiences full of liberals, Eureka Day is not likely to age anytime soon.

The Outsiders. Music and lyrics by Jonathan Clay, Zach Chance and Justin Levine. Book by Adam Rapp and Levine. Broadway in Chicago tour at the Cadillac Palace in Chicago.
February 18
Having seen most of the “Best Musical” Tony winners since the awards’ foundation in 1949 in one format or another, I grabbed this chance to see the Broadway tour of one I’d missed: 2024’s rollicking adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders. This one breaks a general trend in the category towards the victory of quirky, smaller-scale, artistically (as opposed to commercially) focused musicals. See Kimberly Akimbo, Maybe Happy Ending, A Strange Loop, The Band’s Visit, Hadestown and Fun Home for example. The Outsiders by contrast has a big cast and big effects, is crowd-pleasing and spectacle-oriented—and it’s also the only musical from that season to make a profit. But this is no sell-out by voters; The Outsiders is also affecting and enjoyable, as well as compact in narrative frame. Echoing West Side Story, the musical tells the story of two competing teen gangs in 1950s Tulsa, Oklahoma, the working-class Greasers and the upper-class Socs (short for “socialite”). The focus of the story is squarely on its narrator, the Greaser Ponyboy (played on this tour by Nolan White, a recent graduate of University of Michigan), and his desire to see Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke or talk to a wealthier girl without fear of harassment by the rival gang the Socs. Naturally he is not left alone by the Socs, and the gang rivalry climaxes in a powerful scene at the end of act two, which appeared on the Tony Award show. White is not the only newbie in the cast; his brother Darrel is played by Travis Roy Rogers in his professional debut, and much of the cast is young and inexperienced. The ensemble is engaging nonetheless, and as the show is more a director’s phenomenon than an actor’s not much is lost. The singers leap and spin repeatedly to the score, which is by two members of the folk-rock group Jamestown Revival. The arrangements often give prominent placement to acoustic instruments, in keeping with Jamestown’s style, though one might have expected a more rootsy score along the lines of Hadestown. This one is often pure Broadway showtune in melody and conception. Much emphasis is placed in the second half on the tragic fall of a character who heretofore played a relatively small role, but that is one of the few costs to the economization of the narrative that comes from adapting a popular novel. The Outsiders is not an outsider to Broadway razzle-dazzle, but it does have heart.

Salome by Richard Strauss. Lyric Opera of Chicago.
February 14
Last year the Metropolitan Opera debuted a new production of Richard Strauss’ Salome in which the title character has been violated by King Herod and is followed around by seven other Salomes of varying ages to demonstrate the psyche-splitting impact of sexual abuse. That concept may have been inspired in part by this production by Sir David McVicar, which debuted first at the Royal Opera House in London in 2008 and which I saw revived last month at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. This time Salome is not seven girls, but just as last time we see her past with Herod suggested in a sequence of images accompanying the famous “Dance of the Seven Veils,” in which Salome dances seductively at Herod’s request. The projected images are typified by one in which Herod shows off his dad-bod to Salome in a full-length mirror. The clear implication is that Herod has been grooming Salome, or worse. Soprano Jennifer Holloway, who sang the role of Salome with girlish wonder, said in a Lyric publicity video that “Salome, the girl, has gotten a bad rap. Somebody said at some point, she’s done some terrible things … She has not done terrible things before this. Terrible things have been done to her by everybody in this opera. How she can get a bad rap is beyond me.”  This continues a trend at the Lyric of attempts to improve upon the famously malign interpretation of women in opera over the centuries, which I wrote about when Sondra Radvanovsky attempted the same approach with Medea at the Lyric in the fall. The libretto is an edited version of Oscar Wilde’s play of the same name, edited by Strauss himself. Following the biblical story with few variations, Salome requests and gets the head of John the Baptist. Every production grapples with the necessity of having the head on stage in a different way; this one makes the odd choice of having the executioner who beheads the prophet take all of his clothes off before making the assault. Why naked, everyone wants to know? Is he trying to keep his tunic clean? Is he naked so that Salome can embrace him sensually once he presents her with the head, substituting the killer’s body for the prophet’s, to whom she was fatally attracted? McVicar answered the question for the Guardian: He "thought it was right for him to be naked because his body would show up better the blood from the head he has just cut off.” Replies the Guardian’s Erika Jeal: “Clearly.” Indeed. It’s no wonder the production bewilders many online. But it is ultimately among the more interesting productions by McVicar, who is hired so often that I have seen almost a dozen of his operas. Not as lively as his Giulio Cesare, less strange than his Macbeth. And, if the Met’s production is any indication, it is also trendsetting.

Cosi Fan Tutte. Music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. Lyric Opera of Chicago.
February 7
The flimsiest of the productions on this list is the Lyric’s Cosi Fan Tutte, set in a fancy country club in Rhode Island. (Not the most interesting of settings; hard to relate to for many of us; somewhat lacking in dramatic potential.) The singers aim for low comedy gags, but one almost doesn’t notice, as they are so uniformly unfunny that the instinct is to doze off. When, late in act one, a gag landed and the audience laughed, I straightened up and paid more attention. They’re allowed to be funny? The production commits few truly major sins but is conclusively duller than any of the five other Cosis I have seen, with one exception: the traditional production the Met replaced with a likeably splashy Coney Island-set version in 2018. Or anyway the first half of the Lyric’s was that dull. Due in part to my 94-year-old companion, who wanted to get to bed before the lengthy production ended after 11 p.m., my party left at intermission. I do not usually DNF operas. I can only pass on someone else’s observation: Chicago Classical Review says the second half was a little better than the first, but mostly agreed with me on the first half. So, if you have a chance to catch this production, you can decide what to do with this hot take.

Stereophonic by David Adjmi. Broadway in Chicago at the CIBC Theatre.
February 5
The online buzz for this play when it played in New York in 2023-24 was almost unanimously enthusiastic, but for some reason when the show went on tour, theater influencers on TikTok began hearing from the regional audiences that the show was long and tedious. “That’s the point!” replied one influencer who had been one of the show’s biggest boosters. (The influencer is the ever-interesting Kate Reinking.) I laughed at Kate’s conclusion initially and wondered whether this was even a show I looked forward to seeing. But when I saw the play I was surprised to find that “that’s the point” was a reasonably sound statement. Stereophonic is about the tedium and trials of the creative process, and it’s fascinating to a point. Set in a recording studio, the show follows the long, boring process of making a record, punctuated by violent arguments among the band members that mimic those that beset Fleetwood Mac while that band made its classic album Rumours. The show has a bit too little music to qualify for a musical, but the highlights of the play are consistently those moments when the band finally stops talking and starts playing. That’s a real accomplishment for Will Butler of Arcade Fire, who wrote the songs, as the comparison to Rumours is so obvious that the music has to live up to that rock masterwork. The songs play better live than on recording, but that’s what they were built for. Yet the play does lack something of a thematic punch. Ultimately the difference in reaction between NYC and regional audiences remains something of a mystery. Does the apparent brilliance of the initial production stem in part from its lack of robust competition that year? Does it say something about the quality of the performers who did the show at Playwrights Horizons and then on Broadway? Maybe so, but the cast I saw seemed able enough to me. That leaves a cultural question: What is it about New Yorkers that they want to see a band fight over a record more than those in Chicago or elsewhere?